M
enaced by Cold War espionage or else bewildered by post-war urban crime, the
Home Office during the 1950s cast about for a soft target through which to
validate the operational effectiveness of the judiciary and police. Since
the war itself had done much to facilitate homosexual encounters, it was
easy enough to victimize men who had sex with men. The iniquitous clause of
the Criminal Law Amendment Act which had sent Oscar Wilde to the treadmill
half a century earlier could now be enforced with renewed vigour, its
notoriety as a blackmailer’s charter becoming considerably enhanced in the
process.

A requisite sense of the nation’s moral fibre under threat was bolstered by
compliant elements of the national press. The News of the World,
noting that “this particular form of vice is ever tightening”, praised the
visionary solicitude of the Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyffe, in
declaring that “I have a duty to protect people, especially the youth of
this country”. A rival paper, The Sunday Pictorial, launched a
three-part series under the headline “Evil Men”, alerting its readers to the
presence of “male degenerates infesting the West End of London”, whose
“influence is exerted in important spheres of national life”.

If not a calculated response to the impact of this campaign, with its multiple
arrests, trials and jail sentences, Mary Renault’s The Charioteer
(1953) was unquestionably fuelled by the author’s anger and despair in the
face of prejudice. With her partner, Julie Mullard, Renault had left England
in 1948 to live in South Africa, emigrating, as she later acknowledged, “in
a burst of released claustrophobia after that dreadful winter when it froze
for three months and there was no heating and we couldn’t find anywhere to
live”. Settling in a house in Durban, with two actors first encountered on
the voyage out, the pair were soon absorbed by a festive subculture of gay
expatriates, linked only tangentially to the resident native or colonial
communities with their rigorous lines of racial demarcation. The volatility
created by a life of sexual unorthodoxy was intensified at Durban parties
peopled by ex-servicemen nostalgic for a world in which wartime exigencies
enabled the flouting of convention.

In The Charioteer, Renault recaptures this atmosphere by setting her
narrative against the same hospital background in which she and Mullard had
first met as trainee nurses. Much of the novel’s action takes place in the
wards of a London infirmary during the Blitz, where surgeons are expected to
deal with incendiary bombs and ward sisters double as military police. An
overwhelming air of the transient, of relationships snapped in two by
peremptory circumstance, of emotionally fraught lives among bedpans, sutures
and sedatives, lends an urgent authenticity to the novel.

The idea of worlds falling apart only to be replaced by others just as
impermanent is suggested at the story’s outset, when the five-year-old
Laurie Odell witnesses the final crisis of his parents’ unhappy marriage. As
Caroline Zilboorg points out in The Masks of Mary Renault (reviewed
in the TLS, August 24, 2001) this introductory episode is not, as
some critics have suggested, an attempt to root Laurie’s homosexuality in
Oedipal catastrophe so much as a narrative device that will later bring one
of the plot’s most telling episodes neatly into play. Among The
Charioteer’s distinctions as a pioneering gay novel is precisely the
fact that its hero should at no stage appear racked with any special unease
about the nature of his sexuality. Comfort in his skin forms part of
Laurie’s philosophical toughness.

In the next chapter, describing an episode from his boarding-school
adolescence, Laurie is an onlooker rather than a participant – in contrast
to his admired head of house, Ralph Lanyon, who is threatened with expulsion
for what at first seems to have been inappropriate behaviour with a junior
boy. The male-female ambiguity of the latter’s surname, Hazell, mirrors his
compromising role in the affair; it later emerges that, by denouncing Ralph,
Hazell has sought to divert attention from his own masochistic pleasure in
being beaten by him. Ralph’s grasp of this reality emboldens him both to
confront his own sexuality and to acknowledge it to his housemaster. More
significantly, the realization encourages him to make an oblique overture to
Laurie himself by entrusting him with his copy of Plato’s Phaedrus.

An overwhelming air of the transient lends an urgent authenticity to the novel

From this Socratic dialogue Renault drew her novel’s title. The charioteer, in
Plato’s metaphoric presentation of the human soul, is the driver of a
mismatched pair of horses. One of these is instinctively good, “an upright,
noble animal, loving honour, sensible to shame”, the other viciously
inclined, “crooked, headstrong, fiery”. When the driver himself is seized by
desire for some beautiful individual, the more tractable horse will hold
back, restraining himself from sensual enjoyment, while the other struggles
onwards to unchaste intercourse. The moral duality here pervades the book as
something more than merely a fictional restatement of the Choice of
Hercules, that trope of classical antiquity, surely familiar to Renault, in
which the mythical hero weighs up the rival attractions of Beauty and
Virtue. Her object is plainly to advocate for gay love a complexity and
seriousness of intention matching those with which novelists tend to empower
heterosexual relationships. In this, as in other respects, The Charioteer
displays a sophisticated humanity that writers of the period similarly
engaged with this controversial theme found hard to emulate.

Wounded at Dunkirk and making a laborious hospital recovery, Laurie encounters
and falls in love with Andrew Raynes, a young conscientious objector working
as a ward orderly. From the outset he is cast as angelic: “The light shining
sideways on his hair made it look fairer and brighter than in the day. When
he smiled, as he did immediately he saw who it was that had spoken, it
seemed to Laurie almost frighteningly dramatic and beautiful”. Andrew’s
transcendent naivety, however captivating, immediately threatens Laurie with
his own potential as a corruptor of innocence. Reflecting later that “one
gives oneself away without meaning to”, he ruefully concludes that Andrew
“wouldn’t know how to run away from it”.

When Ralph Lanyon re-emerges, it is at a rather too hectic party thrown by a
queer medical student in an apartment furnished emblematically with “one or
two charming little pieces in old walnut; various poufs; a wooden black boy
holding an ashtray; and a crayon drawing, literal and earnestly dull, of a
young sailor’s head”. Ralph, maimed like Laurie, is a spectre at this feast,
reminding the younger man of the business they left unfinished at school.
That very same reticence with which Laurie has sought to deflect his deepest
feelings for Andrew now renders him irresistible to his former schoolfellow.
By the time the pair at last surrender to love, in the blackout’s
complicity, Laurie has become for Ralph “the beloved and desired, for whom
nothing was good enough, of whom nothing was demanded but to trust and
receive”. Laurie himself is sobered into self-knowledge through the relative
ease with which his conquest has been achieved. Beside Ralph – grateful,
satiated and asleep – he finds himself yearning for the more problematic
Andrew, equipped, despite his sexual unawareness, with a natural instinct
for “the hard logic of love”.

The novel displays a sophisticated humanity that writers of the period found hard
to emulate

Among Renault’s purposes in writing The Charioteer had been to
expose the harm created by the way in which a widespread persecution of
homosexuals drove them into unsuitable company. “People who are idealistic
and generally well-integrated”, she told a BBC interviewer in 1982, “are
thrown together in this huddle with dregs and they don’t belong together in
any way, but they have to feel they do because they’re made defensive.” In
making his choice between Ralph, wise giver of the Phaedrus, and
radiant Andrew, who listens to Mozart and quotes Vaughan’s poems, Laurie
ultimately finds his hand forced not by either man but through the vengeful
manoeuvres of Ralph’s cast-off boyfriend, the camp, brittle Bunny, whom he
has earlier sought to shake off as common and stupid.

Considering prevalent attitudes to homosexuality in the England Renault left
behind, The Charioteer’s acceptance for publication by Longman was a
notable act of faith, the more so since Morrow, the author’s American
publisher, was quick to turn the book down for fear of prosecution. In the
wider perspective of Mary Renault’s oeuvre we might be tempted to view the
book simply as a testing ground for ideas more sharply explored in her
mature novels of male love – The Last of the Wine (1956), Fire
From Heaven (1970) or The Persian Boy (1972) – the relationship
between Laurie and Ralph prefiguring, in its various phases, those of Alexis
with Lysias or Alexander with Hephaistion and Bagoas. This earlier work,
however, in its stylistic grace and restraint, in the subtlety shaping its
unsettling conclusion, and in the no-nonsense conviction with which the
author handles her theme, can look its successors squarely in the face.